The Hamilton Spectator

Testimony By Scott Turow Grand Central, 485 pages, $38

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The central character in Scott Turow’s engrossing new book is a trial lawyer with too much on his plate. Bill ten Boom is mid-50s, a litigation ace in Kindle County, pulling in huge fees, married and the father of two grown sons. Then he junks it all in order to “start my life again.”

That takes Boom to the Internatio­nal Criminal Court in The Hague where the book’s plot gets rolling in a trajectory that, through its zigs and zags, is never without surprises and thrills, both intellectu­al and physical.

Boom’s assignment is to track the villains who slaughtere­d 400 Roma in one horrendous butchering during the Serbian-Bosnian War and to bring the perpetrato­rs to trial. Turow is masterful at telling Boom’s story, revealing that nothing in it, including the parts involving the lawyer’s romantic interludes, comes even remotely close to what we readers expected.

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